BEHAVIORAL MODELS TAKE THE PAIN OUT OF SYSTEM SIMULATION.

Designers trust hardware. When they build a breadboard, they have implicit faith in the validation of the design's logic though they may still worry about differences in performance between the prototype and the production version. But in a software simulation, many more areas require this trust. A designer must believe in the correctness of the software simulator itself, in the hardware on which the simulation is run and perhaps most important, in the correctness of the part models. This, of course, assumes that the part models are available. The lack of models for commercially available parts has stopped many system designers from attempting to logic simulate their designs. This article introduces hardware modeling - integrating real ICs into a software modeling environment - which provides an alternative to nonexistent software models. The main topics are software vs. hardware modeling, in-circuit emulation, simulation model development, and model accuracy.